The Jesus Dynasty

James D. Tabor

Paperback, $16.00

Simon & Schuster

April 2006

400 pages

James D. Tabor is a biblical scholar and archaeologist who spent decades studying the earliest extant documents concerning Jesus, his movement, and the beginnings of Christianity.  In this book, he uses those documents and his archaeological finds to construct the history of Jesus’s life and family, as well as the early years of Christianity.

Let me say first that although Tabor is an historian, he is extremely sensitive to religious belief (too much so for my taste, as I believe it often leads him to confuse fact with tradition).  However, he does come up with some theories that I suppose are jarring for many Christians, particularly those who take the Bible literally.  Maybe it is my lack of adherence to this religion, but I didn’t find any of Tabor’s ideas very revolutionary.  Basically, he takes things we know must have happened and hypothesizes about how or when they occurred.  For example, for those of us who can’t quite wrap our brains around the idea of a virgin birth, a human father for Jesus has always been the rational explanation.  Tabor just carries that farther by taking a guess at who that father was.  Another example: Tabor points out that Jesus had brothers and sisters.  Well yeah.  If you’ve ever read the New Testament you should already know that (although apparently a lot of people choose to ignore it).   He spends the latter portion of the book, post-crucifixion, explaining his belief that James “the beloved disciple,” Jesus’s brother, took over as head of the movement after Jesus’s death.

Tabor is strongest when he points out portions of the New Testament that have simply been overlooked or ignored for centuries, but otherwise I think his conclusions are highly suspect.  He utilizes the Gospels as evidence when it suits his purposes to do so, but dismisses them as dogmatic and unreliable when they contradict what he wants to say.  Further, Tabor commits the cardinal sin of historical research: he takes the absense of evidence as proof of something.  Admittedly sources from the time of Jesus, or even from the first century AD, are extremely scarce, but there comes a point when you simply have to say “We may never know” rather than stretching whatever sources do exist to the very limits of the imagination.  Tabor even says at one point (referring to a passage in Mark) “It is amazing what firm opinions have been built upon such shaky foundations.”  No hint of irony from him, but that sentence pretty much sums up Tabor’s research.

I know I’m being a bit harsh, but I am an historian myself, so I expect a lot, especially if you’re going to go around claiming to have solved centuries-old mysteries.  However, I do think this book is worth a read (with a grain of salt) because Tabor does a great job of reasserting John the Baptist’s oft-forgotten importance, and in explaining the cultural and religious background of being a first-century Jew in Galilee.  And I will also say that Tabor’s ideas all make total sense and could be true, but I just don’t think he has enough proof in most cases to be as assertive as he is.  But that doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t share his theories and continue to search for answers…Take a look.